Saturday, January 30, 2010

Bipartisanship Failed The Test of Time Last Year, These Republicans Won’t Work With Us Now by Anthony McCarthy

When the Senate Democrats and the administration stop looking for cover they’ll get a chance to succeed

There should be a law of politics that when a political party has held power for as long as the Republicans did and their ideas have produced results such as theirs that those ideas are declared to have failed the test of time and no one should advocate them anymore. Anyone who pretends this didn’t happen, should disappear from public view because they can’t be taken seriously by serious people. That would mean they shouldn’t get on TV or the radio. But we can’t expect the corporate media to enforce that law, they have been a part of that failure, one of the main features of it. The mass media of the Republican era also has failed the public, entirely.

Republicans don't believe that government exists to benefit most people, they are the party for the rich and those they can dupe into voting against their own interest and those whose hatred and fear is stronger than their reason. Republicans were given one party rule to try their ideas out and those ideas have failed, conclusively. That is one of the primary truths of our time. Their clear and stated intention to not learn from the failure of their ideas and theories, repeated just last night, is irrefutable evidence of why bipartisanship today is inherently ill founded and is guaranteed to fail. Bipartisanship failed the test in 2009, for just those reasons, it will fail in 2010.

At first I hoped that yesterday’s presidential Q & A with the Republicans of Congress, was for show. I hoped that Barack Obama’s first year, failed largely through a self-damaging try at bipartisanship, would have been enough for him to have seen that it wouldn’t work. The Republican’s monolithic NO! has been impressive for its being unambiguous. Pretending that still isn’t what they intend is foolish and damaging for Democrats.

As The Rude Pundit so rudely but so, so correctly pointed out, if the Obama administration hadn’t traded a third of the stimulus bill for inefficient tax cuts it would have been a greater success. In order to get a grand total of the two phony moderates of Maine and the then Republican Arlen Specter, they crippled their stimulus bill, the part of their economic program that was supposed to reach Main Street.

The Republicans don’t want government to succeed at the things we want it to. They like the kind of failure they produced, with its notable benefits to the wealthy, no matter how many lower income people it hurts. They produced those kinds of results several times now, you can’t believe that’s not their intention. Their theory of their government has been retested over and over again, their ideas have failed, continually.

The use of the stimulus bill by Republicans and their media shills is also illustrative of the futility of trying to work with them. Observe their cynicism for yourself. While every massive failure of Republican theory is passed over or ignored, every glitch in the stimulus is trumpeted as a proof of failure and waste. As always the rules applied to Democratic rule, when real flaws aren’t there, they’ll invent them as facilely as they did “travel gate” and “transition gate”. The media lies, from misrepresenting clerical errors of people who didn't know what county they live in, to the cabloid distortions, - for example, a road repair project dismissed as “beautification” - should put to rest the idea that bipartisanship with any faction of the Republican Party is possible. The media only likes the idea of bipartisanship for the use that their party, The Republican Party, can make of it to discredit good government.

It’s past time, it’s way, way past time, to cite the history of the struggle to get Republicans to cooperate during the past year, cite that they only want to repeat the ideas that were a colossal failure during their one party reign, and move on without them. Repeating the pantomime of yesterday might be entertaining but only encourages Republican obstruction. The use they made of “bipartisanship” last year is counterproductive. Its failure is now the failure of the pathetic and cowardly attempts of Democrats to get them to work with us. When they and their media try to lie or to change the subject repeat it and ram it down their throats. Here is where Rahm Emanuel’s skills could possibly do some good. The way Emanuel’s tough guy act was used last year has also failed the test of time.

If Barack Obama and the Democrats in the Senate don’t stop trying to find cover in that fantasy and govern as they were elected to do, they’ll have a repeat of the past year. Enabling failed politics in order to get cover from the cheerleaders of Republicanism is guaranteed to make your new ideas fail which they'll be only to happy to point out.

The Republicans didn’t compromise during their long reign of error, they didn’t float new ideas or cooperate a year ago when they’d been trounced at the polls. The fantasy that they’re going to do either now when they believe they are resurgent is too stupid for anyone to believe anymore.

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